654
SELMA .FRAIBERG
men protest that it was dark, they were ignorant, and they had
been deceived.
In
The
Holy
Sinner
the ardor of the sinful pair is unspoilt
for two years. When a gossipy maid leads Sibylla to the ivory tablet
in Grigorss' room, the whole story comes out in the open and the
lovers discover their incestuous relationship. The scene of discovery
is played in operatic style with shrieks, swoons, and ritual breast–
beating. When the noise subsides the incest hero is found racked
by bourgeois torments. Now should Sibylla be called "mother" or
"aunt"; is their child his wife's grand-d.aughter, and what is his
relationship to his own child? What is he? Grigorss goes off to
his
rock to do penance and Sibylla humbles herself by caring for lepers.
In Mann's last chapter Sibylla makes a pilgrimage to Rome
to confess her sins to the great Pope Gregorius whose fame has
spread throughout the world. In the Pope's chambers the old incest
comedy is renewed and mother and son resume the pretense of
not knowing each other.
Sibylla makes her confession of incest which ends with the
most extraordinary confession of all:
. . . How by the finding of the tablet, she sobbed, the identity of
child and spouse had been frightfully revealed and her soul for
horror had swounded, but only in play-acting-wise, for on top the
soul pretends and makes to-do the diabolical deception practiced
on it, but underneath, where truth abides in quietness, the identity
had been known at the first glance, and conscious-unconscious she
had taken her own child for husband, because again he had been
the only one equal in birth.
And the Pope replies:
Great and extreme, woman, is your sin, and to the very bottom
have you confessed it to the Pope. This thoroughness to -the utter–
most is greater penance than when according to your sin-husband's
arrangement you wasI1ed the feet of beggars....
The Pope reminds her that however grave the sin, true repentance
.will bring salvation. And then He makes his,confession:
The measure of the sinfulness . . . is controvertible before
God,
.the more .so that .thy child in that place where the soul makes no
pretense, likewise very well knew that it was his mother whom he
loved.
